Monday verses

Reading poetry together: Maggie Smith, Su Tung p’o, and Michael Ondaatje

When a friend first told me about the man who was to become my husband, one of the first things she said about him was that when he was in college, he was known to sit at the park reading poetry.

So, naturally, when we had our first date, driving around the city where I was living, I thought we should go to the park and read poetry to each other.

Dear readers, that was the last time we read poetry together at the park.

And while I have been known to read a poem to my husband now and then—I read Walt Whitman’s The Runner to him last night because he is a runner—poetry is not usually the genre he reaches for. In fact, I’m not sure it was even true that he ever read poetry in the park except to woo me when we were dating (I hope he will forgive me if I’m wrong…he did Minor in English).

And before we go any further, I’d like to say that our relationship probably works better because I’m the angsty poetry/speculative fiction reader, while he is typically reading lots of theology (he is a pastor after all), trail guidebooks, The Atlantic and, once every few years, A River Runs Through It or another realistic/outdoor/adventure-type fiction.¹

Photo by Marco Biondi on Unsplash

All that is to say that some of my favorite people don’t love to read poetry. But also, some of the wisest people I know are intimidated by poetry.

Poetry can be daunting. I once met an English teacher who told me that she didn’t love to teach poetry because it scared her.

Now, I’m no expert in poetry criticism but the thing about it is that you don’t really have to “understand” it to find delight in a poem.

Sometimes it is just the rhythm, the turn of phrase, the way the words click and clack on your tongue.

Sometimes it is one image from the poem that stays with me. Poems have the capacity expand our vision in the present but also change how we will see the things we thought we already knew.

In In the Grand Scheme of Things, Maggie Smith writes:

from here an airplane seems to fly only from one tree to another, barely

chalking a line between them

That line stayed with me for days so that when I saw an airplane leaving white trails across the sky, all I could think about was how it does look like chalk outlines.

Here’s a line from On a Painting By Wang the Clerk of Yen Ling by Su Tung p’o:

The slender bamboo is like a hermit

The simple flower is like a maiden

The first line stopped me. What does it mean? How is bamboo like a hermit? I thought for a few moments about my limited experience with bamboo and I still didn’t understand. But it was a nice way to spend a few moments, wasn’t it? And the image it conjured in my mind was lovely.

Michael Ondaatje’s poem Lock goes lots of places but I keep thinking about two parts. The first stanza:

Reading the lines he loves

he slips them into a pocket,

wishes to die with his clothes

full of torn-free stanzas

and the telephone numbers

of his children in far cities

I decided that it’s not the worst goal to have: that after you die, someone finds you with your pockets full of poetry and the phone numbers of your children.

Here is the second part that stayed with me:

Even then I wanted

to slip into the wet dark

rectangle and swim on

barefoot to other depths

where nothing could be seen

that was a further story

My ten year old and I read the poem together and as we talked about it, we came to think that the poem could be read as a poignant meditation on the things we really need when we die and the mysteries after death (she didn’t use the words “poignant meditation” btw).

I like reading poems just before bed (though I go through seasons when I don’t read a lot of poetry) but I also love reading them together with someone else, savoring both the images and metaphors and also the time you spend together thinking of words, mysteries, and all the things that other people help us see.

What are your favorite poems?

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Further reading OR where I got the poems I quoted:

• Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer: Pep Talks and Practical Advice For the Creative Life

• A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz

• A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje

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My books:

• Mystics and Misfits: Meeting God Through St. Francis and Other Unlikely Saints

• Awakened By Death: Life-Giving Lessons from the Mystics

1. Occasionally we will swap genres for fun. That’s how I read and loved Into Thin Air by John Krakauer.